Bridget Anderson

Bridget Anderson is Professor of Migration and Citizenship and Research Director at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford. She is the author of Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Controls (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour (Zed Books, 2000). In her research, Bridget explores the tension between labour market flexibilities and citizenship rights. Her interest in labour demand has meant an engagement with debates about trafficking and modern day slavery, which in turn led to an interest in state enforcement and deportation, and in the ways immigration controls increasingly impact on citizens as well as on migrants. Bridget has worked closely with migrants’ organisations, trades unions and legal practitioners at local, national and international level.

Sharan Burrow

Sharan Burrow has been the General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) since June 2010. Prior to this, she held the position of ITUC President since its Founding Congress in Vienna (November 2006) and the position of President of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) since 2004. She is the first woman to have held any of these positions. Sharan was previously Vice-President of Education International from 1995 to 2000. Education International is the international organisation of education unions representing 24 million members worldwide. Sharan became the second woman to be elected President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) in May 2000, and in October 2000 she also became the first woman to be elected President of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions Asia Pacific Region Organisation. She has also served as a member of the Governing Body of the International Labour Organisation and as a member of the Stakeholder Council of the Global Reporting Initiative.

Ali Moussa Iye

Ali Moussa Iye is Chief of the History and Memory for Dialogue Section of UNESCO, where he runs the Slave Route Project and the General and Regional Histories Project (including history of humanity, general history of Africa, general history of Caribbean, history of civilisations of Central Asia, general history of Latin America, and the different aspects of Islamic Culture). Prior to this, he was Coordinator of the UNESCO Programme of Culture of Peace in the Horn of Africa based in Addis Ababa. He then ran the Democracy Programme and finally the Programme on the Fight against Racism and Discrimination at UNESCO headquarters.

Parallel to his functions within UNESCO, Ali continues his research in the field of political anthropology, in particular on the democratic traditions and customary laws of Somali Pastoralists. He has published in several research books and international reviews and journals on the Horn of Africa. He is the author of a pioneer work on the ‘pastoral democracy’ of Somalis, “Le verdict de l’Arbre : essai sur une démocratie endogène africaine”. Ali holds a Ph.D. from the Institute of Political Sciences in Grenoble, France. Before joining UNESCO in 1997, he occupied different positions in his home country of Djibouti, including working as a journalist and editor in chief.

Sally Engle Merry

Sally Engle Merry is Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University and faculty Co-director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law. Her research interests include anthropology of law; human rights; gender and race; forms of governance; audit culture, and governmentality. She is the author most recently of Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective(2009). Her forthcoming book regards indicators as a technology of knowledge used for human rights monitoring and global governance.

Aidan McQuade

Aidan McQuade has been the Director of Anti-Slavery International, the oldest international human rights organisation in the world, since 2006. Prior to this, he worked for over 13 years in humanitarian response, development and human rights. This included periods in Ethiopia and Eritrea working on rural water supply and soil conservation, and Afghanistan. He also spent five years in Angola at the end of the civil war managing an emergency relief programme for over a quarter of a million people in the besieged cities of the interior as well as working with the UN on human rights protection of civilians from military excesses. He wrote his doctorate on ethical choice making in professional practice.

Charles W. Mills

Charles W. Mills is John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University. He works in the general area of social and political philosophy, particularly in oppositional political theory as centered on class, gender, and race. His first book, The Racial Contract (Cornell University, 1997), won a Myers Outstanding Book Award for the study of bigotry and human rights in North America. His second book, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell University, 1998), was a finalist for the award for the most important North American work in social philosophy of that year. His most recent book is a collection of his Caribbean essays, Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality: Race, Class and Social Domination (University of the West Indies Press, 2010). Before joining Northwestern, Charles taught at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was a UIC Distinguished Professor.

Nandita Sharma

Nandita Sharma is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoā and Director of its International Cultural Studies Graduate Certificate Program. She is the author of Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of 'Migrant Workers' in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2006). Nandita supports No Borders movements and those struggling for a global commons, and her research interests address themes of human migration, migrant labor, national state power, ideologies of racism and nationalism, processes of identification and self-understanding, and social movements for justice.

Ronald Weitzer

Ronald Weitzer is Professor of Sociology at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He has published extensively in the areas of sex work and human trafficking, including an edited book Sex For Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry (Routledge 2010) and Legalizing Prostitution: From Illicit Vice to Lawful Business (New York University Press, 2012). He has conducted ethnographic research on legal prostitution systems in Belgium, Germany, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands, and is the co-editor of a special issue devoted to human trafficking of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (May 2014). Recent research includes a content analysis of U.S. newspaper coverage of human trafficking and an article on trafficking and slavery in the Annual Review of Sociology (2015).

Beyond Trafficking and Slavery seeks to help those trying to understand forced labour, trafficking and slavery by combining the rigour of academic scholarship with the clarity of journalism. Our goal is to use evidence-based advocacy to unveil the structural political, economic, and social root causes of global exploitation.

Gendered, racist, classist, homophobic, and transphobic violence haunts the world of sex work. Sex workers speak. Who listens? addresses that violence, but it does so from the perspective of sex workers themselves. By publishing their voices directly we hope to help readers resist indifference and to become more critical of states’ interventions.

The BTS Short Course brings 167 contributions from 150 top academics and practitioners into the world’s first open access ‘e-syllabus’ on forced labour, trafficking, and slavery. This eight-volume set is packed with insights from the some of the best and most progressive scholarship available. Read on...